Rob Zombie's 2007 Halloween Remake Gives Us an Origin Story for Michael Myers And Not Much More
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Horror fans live in a state of perpetual disappointment. We are forever rooting for fright flicks to be good, even great, despite knowing that horror movies mostly suck. This is particularly true of long-running franchises.
That is unsurprisingly the case with the Halloween movies, which I decided to cover in their entirety because doing so will momentarily divert me from life’s inexorable horrors.
Nothing makes you forget about the grim state of our peculiar planet and rancid republic quite like watching a masked, silent, emotionless killing machine destroy the lithe young bodies of horny, stoned teenagers as punishment for sin and/or because an evil Druid cult controls him.
I was cautiously optimistic about Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween reboot because it is the product of an auteur with a deep love of horror and distinctive style and sensibility that seemed perfect for the material.
It seemed like Zombie had a vision for Halloween beyond recreating the original as closely as possible.
Zombie’s Halloween provides an origin story for a character that has come to represent evil incarnate. Just as Phantom Menace gave us Darth Vader back when he was just a li’l pipsqueak with surprising potential for both good and evil, Zombie’s Halloween asks us to empathize—but not too much!—with a horror icon who has been hacking his way through Haddonfield since at least Halloween, 1978.
We’re introduced to Michael Myers in 1990, not in his final form, as an unstoppable killer with a weakness for masks and machetes, but rather as a bullied and neglected little blonde boy.
Life is not easy for li’l Michael Myers. His mother works as a stripper to support her family because her lazy, good-for-nothing husband has no interest in honest labor. He’s not too keen on the concept of labor, or honesty, for that matter.
William Forsythe plays the leering creep who ogles his teenage stepdaughter’s posterior and comments on it lasciviously. He’s one of a seemingly infinite number of familiar faces from horror’s hallowed history.
Zombie goes so overboard with stunt casting that it becomes distracting. Sure, it’s great to see Malcolm McDowell, Brad Dourif, Forsythe, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers’ Danielle Harris, Richard Lynch, Clint Howard, Danny Trejo, Udo Kier, Clint Howard, Bill Moseley, Leslie Easterbrook, Dee Wallace, Ken Foree, Sybill Dannings, Adrienne Barbeau, Micky Dolenz, Daniel Roebuck and Sid Haig in the same movie.
Seeing the drummer/singer for the Monkees pop up briefly as the proprietor of a gun store would have taken me out of the movie if I were into it at any point.
Zombie wants us to see the humanity in Michael Myers. He asks us to care about the troubled boy behind the notorious man.
Unfortunately, Zombie’s script is full of cheap psychology and largely devoid of characterization.
Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch) was moved to kill because his life had become unlivable. He’s abused by his stepdad and embarrassed that his mother has to take off her clothes and gyrate to music to make a living. He murders animals. That’s never a good sign, both because it is a trait many serial killers share and because killing pets is horrific and unconscionable in its own right.
Things aren’t any better at school. He’s bullied by the usual pint-sized predators. The only person who seems to care about him is Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell in Donald Pleasence’s signature role), and that’s mainly due to the good doctor’s suspicion that the little guy with the vacant expression and thousand-yard stare could end up killing a whole lot of people unless he intercedes.
Michael is introduced wearing a clown mask, a seeming reference to Jamie Lloyd’s costume in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. He likes wearing masks because he’s ashamed of himself and his family.
In a fit of rage, Michael kills his main bully and then turns his homicidal attention to his own family, sparing only his baby sister Laurie. When the police come to arrest Michael for his horrific crimes, he is cradling a baby with incongruous tenderness.
Michael’s murder spree wins him a one-way trip to Smith's Grove Sanitarium, where he becomes a patient of Dr. Loomis.
Loomis thinks he can get through to the traumatized young serial killer. The child with the impressive body count and bright future in mass murder seems to have blacked out during the murders.
In the most/only poignant moment in the movie, the kiddie Michael Myers asks if his family is doing okay, and Loomis has to resist the urge to tell him that, aside from being slaughtered en masse, except for his mom and baby sister, they’re enjoying restful eternal slumber six feet deep.
Fifteen years later, the sad little boy who channeled his pain and anguish into killing animals and children has grown into a towering mountain of a man with long, stringy hair.
In the original Halloween, Michael Myers was played primarily by Nick Castle, a future director (The Last Starfighter) and writer of average height. In the 2007 remake, professional wrestler turned actor Tyler Mane handles the silent but central role.
Mane is nearly a foot taller than Castle. He’s a formidable physical presence but almost impressively uninteresting.
There is a profound disconnect between the sad, traumatized little boy the film’s first act, who acts out against the ugliness and brutality of his small life in a manner that I will concede was a little excessive, in that it involved murdering a lot of people, and the masked, emotionless boogeyman who goes on one of his patented murder sprees after escaping captivity during a prison transfer gone wrong.
Without the original Halloween’s artistry, atmospheric and hypnotic synthesizer score, this is fundamentally a dull, derivative tale of a masked lunatic slaughtering horny, stoned teenagers, during or immediately after sex, if possible.
The slasher genre was new when Carpenter changed everything with Halloween. Thirty years later, Carpenter’s innovations have become the exhausted clichés of a vulgar, critically derided, and voluminous subsection of horror.
Halloween has a terrific, if decidedly overstuffed cast, but lacks a Final Girl with the steely charisma of Jamie Lee Curtis and a comic relief teen sexpot with the energy and allure of P.J. Soles.
Zombie’s well-intentioned but underwhelming attempt to reimagine a classic monster in his own image is bad in a different, more ambitious manner than the lesser Halloween I’ve just written about, but it's still bad and not even in a fun way, like the bonkers Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers.
Will Zombie redeem himself with Halloween 2. Probably not, but I remain, as always, cautiously optimistic.
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